Signifying Nothing
by ncfan
Summary: Ange reads her mother's notebook.


I own nothing.

* * *

She probably should have known better, but when Ange found the notebook, she thought it might have some sort of secret message from her mother inside of it. She thought, for one harrowing moment, that her mother was still alive and that this notebook would contain a secret message that would lead Ange to her. That was a silly hope, Ange knew that, but she had been spending all day going through her mother's belongings, all by herself because Aunt Eva wouldn't touch them, and when even the tiniest sliver of hope was offered to Ange, she gobbled it up.

At first, Ange had thought this to be a diary, but when she cracked it open, she soon realized that this was not the case.

It was practically a book of curses. Ange may have only been six, but she knew what a book of curses looked like. After a certain point, Maria's grimoire looked frankly the same as this, though Kyrie's notebook was without the magic circles and diagrams of a Witch apprentice's grimoire.

'_It hurts…'_

'_Who does she think she is?!'_

'_Why can't he just…'_

Ange didn't understand any of this, and the forceful tone her mother took in writing it frightened her. She put the notebook away with her own books, and tried her best to forget it.

-0-0-0-

When Eva shipped Ange off to St. Lucia's, she took Maria Onee-chan's grimoire with her. It gave her hope, made her believe that maybe she could hold the fragment of her family's love in her hands. She did not take her mother's notebook. Whatever it was contained inside of Kyrie's notebook, it wasn't love. There wasn't so much that Ange could understand when she read it as a little six-year-old, but she knew what hate was, and knew that this notebook of Ushiromiya Kyrie's was filled with it. It frightened her, the idea that her gentle mother could be so full of hate that she could fill up an entire notebook with her rants.

Of course, as she grew older, the bits and pieces she remembered from her single read began to make a bit more sense to Ange. With an older mind, more accustomed to a cruel, ruthless world, she began to understand the core of those words and their meaning. But that was all she had, bits and pieces.

But then, Aunt Eva died, and Ange had to make a quick run for it to evade the Sumadera.

After her aunt died and Ange resolved herself to find the truth of her family's murders, Ange quickly gathered up a few belongings and headed out. One of those belongings was Maria Onee-chan's grimoire. Another was her mother's notebook.

She needed them both to reach the truth. Ange knew that. In order to divine the truth of what happened that day twelve years ago, she needed to remember her love for her family, and her hatred for the one who had stolen them from her. So she needed her cousin's love… And her mother's hate. There was much in Maria's grimoire that had been enlightening. Perhaps Kyrie's notebook would provide enlightenment as well.

It wasn't until she and Amakusa found a good hotel room to hole up in for the night that Ange was even able to crack the notebook open. Last night, she had expended all her efforts on the grimoire, and exhausted herself so thoroughly that she couldn't start on the notebook her mother left behind. Tonight, she would read that.

With some trepidation, remembering faintly the contents of the notebook and fearing that she would randomly open to a page with her name on it, Ange opened Kyrie's notebook, and began to read.

It was just as she remembered it. No, it was worse, because this time around, Ange understood every single word of it. Her heart felt like it was going to burn up and shrivel from the venom in Kyrie's words, but after twelve years of lies, abuse, rumors and recriminations, the hate-filled words of the dead were nothing in comparison.

Ange read the words. The words of hate against Rudolf, against all of the women who had ever caught his eye. The curses Kyrie had written to chase them away, and all the actions she took on the gameboard to make sure they stayed away. The words of hate, more virulent than any other, against the woman who couldn't be chased away, and all the curses Kyrie made against her. Words of hate against that woman's child, for living when Kyrie's did not.

Really, it didn't take long to get all the way through the notebook. It wasn't like a diary. Kyrie's notebook was disorganized and jumbled; even Maria, an elementary school student, had put more care into the style and organization of her curses than this. Kyrie went back and revisited the same point constantly, to the point that, after a while, this just became her saying the same thing over and over again, even if it was phrased differently.

'_I hate the hell I have been forced to crawl through. I hate the ones who threw me into this hell most of all.'_

Ange shut the notebook, and after laying it on her lap, she sighed.

Her father… was not good to her mother. He really was an awful man.

Ushiromiya Rudolf had many lovers and mistresses over the years; Ange's own mother had started out as one. Ange hadn't wanted to believe it when she first heard this; who would? She hadn't wanted to believe that the same father who had been so loving to her could be so horrible to her mother. Sure, Aunt Eva said that Rudolf had a lot of affairs, but why should Ange believe anything she said?

But as the years passed, the evidence piled up. The talk shows and the tabloids all talked about it. More reputable journals published evidence that indicated that Rudolf was giving money and things like expensive jewelry to several women, and why on Earth would be doing that, anyways? On the fifth anniversary of the massacre, a reputable news network had even, as part of a special, interviewed two women who claimed to be Rudolf's lovers at the time of his death. The eleven-year-old Ange had wanted so badly for them to be liars, but they just knew too much not to have been associated with Rudolf on a very personal basis. Later, Ange had spoken with her father's old business associates, the ones who were both still alive and still capable of being found, and they just provided further confirmation.

Eva shut her up in St. Lucia's, a cloister-school full of sterile, artificial girls just when Ange was starting to enter that time of life, so Ange had precious little experience with men as a woman. The closest had been in the old days when Amakusa had flirted shamelessly with her, but that didn't really count; Ange hadn't even realized what he was talking about at all. Eva had, though, and gave him the boot not long afterwards. Though she seriously doubted that her aunt was really trying to do her any favors with that, Ange supposed Eva had done her one anyways. The thought of getting swept up by that man was just too embarrassing.

Ange wasn't very experienced with men, but she knew enough to know that the way her father treated women was deplorable. Oh, that wasn't how Rudolf would have put it. Ange remembered him describing himself as a "gentleman" who was very kind and generous to women; that was now he had liked to see himself. But as a woman, Ange knew that making promises to a woman you didn't intend to keep wasn't treating her well.

There were three core ways to hurt a woman, and from these three branched off countless ways of wounding her. The first two were to hurt her physically and emotionally. The wounds from these two would not heal easily. The third was to crush her hopes. It was the easiest of the three to do by accident, and there was a good chance that the wounds dealt would never heal. Even if they did, the three scars of fear and doubt and distrust would be left behind, never letting a woman forget her old wound.

It didn't matter if Rudolf never acknowledged it himself. This notebook that Ange held on her knees, it was proof that he had been a constant source of pain for Kyrie, even in the midst of love.

_How often did Dad crush your hopes, only to resurrect them again and smash them again, bringing them back a little more battered and bruised every time?_

_But…_

Ange shut her eyes tight and sighed, her breath shuddering. She sank back into the pillows, trying to let them take on the tension in her spine. It would have been easy to pin all of this on Dad. Part of Ange wanted to do just that, and get it over with, but that wasn't the whole story. If there were multiple players in the tragedy of the massacre on Rokkenjima, there were here in this smaller tragedy as well. Two, no, three, and her mother was one of them.

Kyrie… If nothing else, this notebook proved that she was a truly pitiable woman. This notebook was full of her delusions, and her deep hatred. She had not written them down in order to expunge these dark thoughts from her heart. The notebook was full to bursting. The lines on all of the pages were filled, and the same could be found in the margins, in writing so small that Ange had to squint to read it. If Kyrie's intention had been to put these feelings aside, she would have gotten rid of the notebook when it was full. She had written all of this down so she would never forget her deep hatred.

'_I will never forgive her for what she's done. That woman, that nobody, that bitch. I'll repay her for al the wrongs she's done me a thousand times over.'_

Ange couldn't hate a person she had never met. The only possible exception was that, on the infinitesimal chance that Eva hadn't killed her family after all, Ange would look to the Golden Witch, Beatrice, as her family's killer, and hate her. Other than that, Ange couldn't hate a person she had never met. It was too exhausting to put energy into hating a nameless, voiceless phantom. There were many people who Ange knew on a personal level for her to hate, so hating a stranger who had died before she was even born was just too much.

Asumu had caused Kyrie so much pain and anguish. Asumu was the one whom Kyrie named as the root of all her suffering. She called her 'bitch', called her 'whore', called her 'cunning slut', because when she did that, she could distract herself from the real root of her suffering, that one thing that, in all of these pages, Kyrie had never touched on.

Kyrie blamed Asumu for 'stealing' Rudolf from her, as though her lover was a cheap trinket or a car, or any possession that could be stolen. But she also spoke often of the other women who had hung around Rudolf, cheap, flashy women who could never hold his attention for long and were apparently all alike, and whom Kyrie had yet felt threatened enough by to get rid of. She hadn't done the same to Asumu. Had she assumed that this rival would be no threat, no problem for her? Ange didn't know. All she knew was that Kyrie hadn't gotten rid of Asumu, and eventually, no, with frightening speed, Asumu had supplanted her.

This wasn't that thing that Kyrie wouldn't admit to. She did talk about it, at length, in fact, though this she all attributed to Asumu's conniving nature. No, the thing that Kyrie wouldn't admit to was that the root cause of all her suffering was that the man she loved more than any other, had loved another woman more than her.

That had to be it. Ange had noticed it. Rudolf had married Asumu and stayed married to her. Thanks to all of the talking heads digging into the Ushiromiya family, Ange even knew that Battler was Kyrie's blood child, and not Asumu's. Yes, she knew that her mother and Asumu had given birth to baby boys on the very same day, and that one of those boys had died. Kyrie had believed that it was her child who died that day, but it was in fact Asumu's who had never drawn breath in the waking world. The doctors and nurses who had been tending to the two women were questioned, and it was confirmed that Rudolf had bribed all parties involved into switching the babies. With that, Sumadera Kyrie's baby died, and Ushiromiya Asumu's baby came back to life.

Why would he do that? Yes, Ange knew that if Rudolf had let things play out the way they were, he probably would have been forced to divorce Asumu and marry Kyrie; judging from the way Eva talked, the patriarchs of the Ushiromiya family seemed to think little to nothing of the women who married into their families. If, as it was claimed in Kyrie's notebook, Rudolf really loved none by her and had simply been tricked by Asumu, that was surely what he would have done, even if he had to go to the trouble of divorcing his first wife, even if he had to be thought of as the sort of flighty, heartless man who would abandon a woman still grieving over the loss of her child.

But that wasn't what he'd done. Rudolf had instead engaged in a high-risk scheme to switch the facts and make sure that his living child was raised by his _wife_, and not by his mistress. There was always the chance that the doctors and the nurses would have taken his money and gone to the police, or that they would have simply skipped the 'take the money' part. There was a chance that Asumu or Kyrie would find out, or that both of them would. Ange didn't like to imagine how her father would have ended up if Mom had found out that he'd lied and let her believe that her first child had died.

He had probably done all of that because he loved Asumu more than Kyrie. Probably, it was Asumu he wanted to make a life with, and not Kyrie.

The truth hurt. Ange understood that. She felt pain at the thought that her father had loved another woman more than her mother, and whatever pain she felt had to be only a fraction of Kyrie's pain. She didn't hate Asumu, though. In fact, she was rather curious about her.

Battler would tell Ange about Asumu when they were alone. He talked about her with the sort of fervency and love that made her come alive in Ange's mind as well. She wasn't the sort of low, vicious woman Kyrie described in her notebook, or at least that wasn't all there was to her. She couldn't be, to have the eighteen-year-long devotion of her husband, and the lasting devotion of her son. Oh, maybe Battler wasn't Asumu's son by blood, but the bond of love and patience and dedication was surely as strong as any bond of blood and the suffering of childbirth—surely, Asumu was Battler's mother. To have so much of Battler's love, she could not possibly have been the sort of woman Kyrie thought she was.

Kyrie had sent any photo with Asumu in it to Battler after he moved in with his maternal grandparents, but they had come back when Battler moved back in with them, and had remained after he died. Ange had come into possession of Battler's photographs of his mother after he died. Actually, she'd taken a couple of them with her. Both were photographs that also had Battler as a young boy in them, the primary reason that Ange had taken them with her. If she squinted, she thought she could see some of her mother's features in that small face. But Asumu was in them too, and she had looked at the woman whom a young Battler was always shown having a good time with, wondering about her.

She was a woman with faint lines under her eyes, either from sleeplessness or the simple signs of age, Ange didn't know. The clearly visible smile lines about her mouth might have suggested the latter. Ange got the impression that she was someone who smiled a lot.

Her hair was fixed in tight, corkscrew curls—Ange wondered how much anti-frizz shampoo and hairspray Asumu used to keep the frizz away, because she certainly couldn't see any in these photos—and it was the sort of light shade that could have been describe either as brown or as a sort of honey-colored blonde. Her eyes were the color of jade, and she was very slender. It was hard to tell how tall she was in those photos, but judging by her size in relation to Battler (who was noted to be nine by the notes on the backs of both of the photos), she was probably very tall.

Finally getting a good look at Asumu, Ange couldn't help but be a little surprised. She didn't hate Asumu, really, but just from what her mother had written and what all the talking heads were saying, she had gotten an image of this short, busty, very glamorous and very ruthless looking woman. She hadn't expected a sweet-natured looking housewife wearing sweaters and aprons, laugh lines showing clearly around her mouth while she played board games with her son.

But that wasn't how Kyrie saw her, not at all. Asumu probably looked the same as the worst of the demons of Hell in Kyrie's eyes, and Ange wondered if Kyrie looked the same to Asumu. She wouldn't be surprised if she did. Her parents, and Asumu…

Ange remembered one other thing about Kyrie's notebook. She remembered the smudges on the page where Kyrie described her lost child, and cursed Asumu's child for living when hers had died. It looked like Kyrie had been crying when she wrote that, because the page was so smudged that Ange couldn't read all of it, and frankly, she was glad for that.

That page… It made Ange just as angry as it saddened her.

Though Ange knew now that the child who had died that day had been her half-brother, not her full brother, it didn't make her any less sad to have lost her brother. There was another family member who was lost to her forever, indeed, a brother she would never be able to know. She wondered, sometimes, if his hair would have been curly like Asumu's. And it made her angry too. Ange knew that Kyrie hadn't known the truth. And she knew that while this wasn't a diary, it was just as private as one: a book that was never meant to be read by anyone, and shouldn't be used to judge the one who had written it.

But when Kyrie cursed Battler, she was cursing her own flesh-and-blood child. It was extraordinary, how well she had hidden her antagonism and ambivalence towards Battler when she was around him, enough so that Ange suspected that this, at least, may have been what allowed Kyrie to treat him well. But she had still laid out curses against him, wishing that he had died and the dead child had lived. To the last, she believed that she was only the mother of one child. If only she had known.

Beyond anger and sadness, Ange felt the sort of cool, thwarted pity one often felt for those who were beyond her power to help any longer.

All of this, the words of hate and the curses, the manifestation of her mother's delusions and her deep hatred, it was ultimately meaningless.

This was all sound and fury, signifying nothing. That was something Ange had read, once. She wasn't sure where she had read it, if the context fit, or if that was even the right quote, but it came to mind now as the only possible appropriate description for Kyrie's notebook. It was sound and fury, signifying nothing. It was a woman screaming that she would avenge herself, and never actually doing anything to do so.

Kyrie had spent years working up the nerve to kill Asumu, her rival. She had even bought a knife with which to do the deed. But she never actually killed Asumu. Kyrie certainly considered it a miracle that Asumu had died without Kyrie having to get her hands dirty, and even attributed this as being due to her dedication and certainty that she could kill Asumu herself. But to Ange, all it amounted to was that Kyrie was blustering. She hadn't actually killed Asumu.

Certainly, Asumu had died under what was apparently considered suspicious circumstances; at the very least, the _timing _of her death was deeply suspicious, for reasons that Ange was uncomfortably aware of had everything to do with herself. Speculation named both Kyrie and Rudolf himself as possible killers. Ange couldn't speak for her mother, since she knew that Kyrie had in fact possessed the desire to kill Asumu, but she would have protested that Rudolf, at least, would never have done anything like that. He was bad to women, but he wasn't _that _bad.

And it certainly would have given Kyrie pleasure to have been the cause of Asumu's death, but that wasn't how it had happened. Kyrie crowed triumphantly over a complete accident, behaving as though she had brought it about with her will, when in fact, Ushiromiya Asumu had suffered an unfortunately fatal accident, and had left her family behind to grieve for her death. Kyrie celebrated her hated rival's death, but without a result, all her determination to kill her signified nothing.

These three.

Rudolf, and Kyrie, and Asumu too. Ange felt angry with Asumu for hurting her mother, but she could not hate her. Battler and Rudolf had loved her, and for that, Ange could not have a person her brother and father could both love. Rudolf hurt her mother, but he was dead now, and Ange would rather hang on to the memory of Rudolf as a kind father than as a man who was horrible to his wife. Kyrie had cursed Battler, but she grieved so much for the child she thought she had lost that in Ange's eyes, grief overwhelmed hatred utterly.

Ange was going to find the truth, and get her family back, or join them at the very least. She would be reunited with her parents, and her brother. She would come to them with what she knew in the world of 1998, so that Rudolf could apologize and tell Kyrie the truth, and so that her mother could finally let go of her deep hatred.


End file.
